


Thoughts on Caves of Androzani

by Evilawyer



Series: darkness essays [1]
Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Essays, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-06
Updated: 2010-04-06
Packaged: 2017-12-23 02:17:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/920812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evilawyer/pseuds/Evilawyer





	Thoughts on Caves of Androzani

Rewatched Caves of Androzani. I've been meaning to do so for a while, ever since I read about it getting voted the best Doctor Who serial last year. Is it, though? I'm not entirely certain that it is. Nevertheless, I must admit that, when you judge it against Five's other serials, it's certainly Five's best serial in that it surpasses the others by miles. The degree of improvement over its Five-era predecessors makes it stand out in my mind as exceptionally excellent.

It's mostly down to Robert Holmes' writing, I think. I used to to think that Graeme Harper's direction was a major component of the serial's perfection and it probably was, but I stopped thinking so after I watched Waters of Mars. Which is unfair of me, I know, because a director can only do so much with the scripted characters and situations, and future craptasticness doesn't transform past goodness into dreck and it's not Harper's fault I hated Waters but...there's are reasons that those who know me well think I'm a little bitchy, bitchy, bitchy. Stubborn unreasonableness on matters that are largely inconsequential in the greater scheme of things is one of those reasons.

Holmes must have been a very interesting man. All of his stories are, to varying degrees, explorations and even celebrations of the darkness that lies within people. And by “darkness,” I don't mean “ooh, let's look all intense while we burn stuff up because we're really still self-absorbed twelve-year-olds fixated on getting our own way.” That's not darkness; that's just self-centered, adolescent sociopathy that, untempered by anything but the passing of time, solidifies into solid-core dickheadedness. Bored now. 

No. Dark, as Holmes wrote it, is a word that fits characters who (1) look at life and see that it is never, ever going to be “happy” in the sense of posing no threats and no worries from outside or within, (2) look at others and see that all of them, even the most saintly, are capable of performing heinous atrocities and other acts of thinking and unthinking cruelty, (3) look at themselves and see and accept that they are no different from everyone else, (4) can function --- even function well depending on how far they go in embracing their knowledge of these factors --- in their settings despite and perhaps even because of knowing these things and (5) still see a kind of humor in all of this and react to it with humor (typically sarcastic humor because that's what darkness begets). They may never do anything rash or hurtful themselves, and they can exhibit other pleasant and unpleasant traits that bring light to or overshadow the dark, but their personalities are defined by these factors. 

Applying these elements to the various Doctors, I maintain the following: Four was dark. So was Nine. Three was on the verge of dark but too caught up in himself and his predicament to get quite there. Six was darkish. Seven was pitch black. One had moments of dark in him, but it wasn't anywhere near front and center. Two and Eight (TVM version) have joyous exploration-seeking energy levels that keep them from being dark, although they do have some understanding of the concept in others. [Two, in particular, is too energized and unjaded during his tenure to be dark even when dealing with creatures like the Cybermen, although his ultimately correctly-placed intolerance of the Androgum in The Two Doctors indicates that he has by that point lost some of his upbeat attitude and may have gotten a little closer to the dark side.] Ten, not dark; something, to be sure, but not dark. In addition, all of these Doctors maintained their individual levels of darkness throughout their tenures. They ended more or less as dark as they were when they started. Five, however, is different in that regard. With Five, we get to see a slight descent into darkness that takes an abrupt plunge in Caves of Androzani.

Five's tenure is, for the most part, marked by a persistent optimism. As much as I love Peter Davison's impression of William Hartnell in Castrovalva, Five just has too much verve to pull the old-man-grump off for more than a minute. Five is filled with inquisitiveness and zest and is quite excited about everything even when he is being staid and proper. Then he kills off Adric (okay, okay, he didn't do it directly, but he left him there when he had to have known that the chances Adric would make it were exceedingly slim), and he takes Turlough in and is rewarded with attempted murder, and Tegan leaves him because of the high body count he's taken to leaving in his wake, and he kills the Master and … well, roaming around the universe gets to be a bit of a downer, really, doesn't it? But we still don't see that Five feels any of that as it's happening, not fully. His enthusiasm does not permanently flag, and he seems to hold firm in a belief that the small, beautiful moments will outweigh everything awful in the end. He has an occasional moment of seeming self-reflection, such as at the beginning of Time Flight and the end of Resurrection of the Daleks, but mostly he keeps on adventuring through space and time as he clings on to his boyish optimism. His experiences are affecting him, though, all the way until Caves and, when we finally get there, we get to see what I think of as darkness in him. 

In Caves, perhaps more so than ever before, we see a Doctor who really gets slapped around by the people and circumstances around him. That isn't what's striking about the serial to me, though. What makes it striking is that Five, for what I think is the first time, seems to both understand and accept that bad things do happen, that societies can be incurably sick at their cores, that people can be horrible to each other, that good does not always triumph over evil and that he cannot always make things better --- indeed, that things cannot always be made better by anyone. He seems to recognize that there is only so much he can ever do, and that he can do nothing to fix the greater problems that overlay the discrete mess into which he has stumbled. He doesn't get involved in any way in the greater wrongs around him, focusing instead on saving Peri from death by poisoning, which is the only thing for which he bears any responsibility and the only thing he can actually do anything about. Androzani Major, giant cesspool that it sounds like, he leaves to stew in its own corruption. 

Beyond the big picture, Five also seems to be capable of identifying specific problems and threats posed by others on a more personal level, as though he understands the danger posed because he could pose such a danger himself, at least in the abstract. The Doctor has never been good around authority, but the way Five talks to Chellek transcends a dislike for being told what to do by people in charge. It has elements of understanding why Chellek is treating them the way he is, even as he rails against the treatment. There are other examples of Five's recognition of the danger and darkness in others, the most obvious being Five's realization that Sharaz Jek, for all his highfaluting talk of admiring beauty, poses a significant threat of sexual violence to Peri. Pre-Caves Five tried to keep an eye out for things that endangered his companions, but I don't believe that he would have ever specifically recognized a sexual threat to any of them (not that there were any such threats, thank goodness). Caves Five does, though, both in terms of the nature and severity of the threat --- you can tell by the way he uses his own body to physically shield Peri from Jek that it's the first thing that crops up in his mind. (Granted, Jek is over the top with his menace, but I still think younger Five would have been more inclined to see Jek as a tragic “Phantom of the Opera” type to whom he would have tried to extend help rather than a head-to-toe leather-clad potential rapist from whom he must save Peri.) There is also the way that Five speaks. His overall tone is generally more sarcastic than it has been before, saying “thank you” when he feels no gratitude and rambling on about how fun the nature walks with Jek are going to be when Jek tells them he's keeping them forever. His disturbing little smile when Jek tells him that he yammers like a prattling jackanapes but that his eyes tell a different story is also telling; it hints at Five's awareness that his life experience has, as Jek suspects, given him an outlook that is not as Pollyanna-like as would first appear. Even Five's voice (and this is something of a surprise, because Davison has always been a serviceable actor but he's never particularly stood out in any way to my way of thinking) sounds darker; it's wearier, deeper and grittier than his usual enthusiastic, high-pitched voice, even before he starts getting sick. 

Caves Five is not a nice man. He's not a terrible man, either, but he has reached the point where he understands that “evil” cannot be eradicated, that it does not always come in the easy-to-spot, easy-to-fight form of a megalomaniac trying to take over the universe and can actually come from within, and that “lesser evils” are no less terrible than the big ones for their smaller scale. It took him a while, but he got there.


End file.
